# Ekorbia v0.4 & v0.5 — Spaces, an offline UI, and voice input > Source: > Published: 2026-07-03 00:00:00+00:00 [← All posts](./index.html) # Ekorbia *v0.4 & v0.5* — Spaces, an offline UI, and voice input Two releases have landed since the cross-platform v0.3. **v0.4** brings guided setup, in-app model management, and a UI that runs fully offline. **v0.5** gives Ekorbia a voice: on-device dictation you can trigger from anywhere. ## v0.4 — the "no terminal required" release Up to v0.3, getting started still required running `ollama pull` in a terminal. v0.4 removes that requirement. ### Guided first-run setup Launch Ekorbia with no model installed and it now looks at your machine's memory, recommends a right-sized Gemma 4 (`e2b` for 8 GB or less, up to `31b` for 64 GB and beyond), and downloads it in-app with a progress bar. If you want folder search it grabs the `nomic-embed-text` embedding model in the same step. No terminal, no guessing which model fits. ### An in-app model manager A new **Settings → Models** tab lists your installed models with their on-disk sizes, deletes them with a confirmation, and pulls new ones with a live, cancellable progress bar. It's reachable from wherever you'd want it — **Manage models…** in the composer's model picker, a **Download a model…** button when nothing is installed, and the startup "Model not found" dialog all lead to the same place. ### Spaces v0.4 replaces the lightweight sidebar chat groups with **Spaces** — a named workspace that bundles the context a project needs: - a **default model** for new chats in the Space, - optional **pinned files and folders** that attach themselves to every new chat, - optional **pinned prompts**, and - an optional **Space-scoped memory file**. Any pinned file, folder, or prompt can be **locked**, which forces it to stay attached and removes the × from its composer chip so it can't be detached mid-chat — handy for a system-prompt-style instruction you always want in force. A Space with no pins and no memory file behaves as a plain organisational bucket, so the old "just a folder" use case still works. ### Watch recipes and a Today digest Creating a watch used to mean filling out a blank form. Now it starts from one-click **recipes** — Summarise new downloads, Watch a price, Watch job listings, Follow a blog, or Custom — that pre-fill the kind, prompt, cadence, and a model picker that defaults to a model you actually have pulled. The Watches panel gained an **All / Today** toggle and a **Chat about today** button that opens a chat seeded with the last 24 hours of summaries. And folder watches can now skip files already present, so pointing one at a busy folder like Downloads doesn't summarise the entire backlog on the first poll. ### Snappier reasoning models Ekorbia now detects thinking-capable models (`qwen3.x` , `deepseek-r1` , `gpt-oss` , …) via Ollama's `/api/show` probe and sends `think: false` by default — so they answer right away instead of streaming a long hidden chain-of-thought first. You get the model's response, not a wait. ### A fully offline UI This one's invisible until you unplug the network. React, ReactDOM, Babel-standalone, marked, highlight.js, DOMPurify, and the Inter / JetBrains Mono / Instrument Serif fonts now ship *inside* the app under `ui/vendor/` (pinned versions and checksums) instead of loading from unpkg.com and Google Fonts at runtime. The only network traffic Ekorbia produces is to your local Ollama server on `127.0.0.1:11434` . A new Playwright spec (`offline-boot.spec.js` ) boots the UI with every non-localhost request blocked and fails the build if any external request is even attempted — so "fully offline" stays true, release over release. ## v0.5 — your voice, on your machine v0.5 adds voice input, and it holds the same line the rest of the app does: nothing leaves your machine. Speech is transcribed on-device with [whisper.cpp](https://github.com/ggml-org/whisper.cpp) — no audio is ever uploaded. ### Push-to-talk dictation There's a new **mic button** in the composer, between the prompt button and the model picker. Click it, speak, and click again to insert the transcript at your cursor; `Esc` cancels. First use downloads a small English model (`base.en` , about 142 MB; `tiny.en` and `small.en` are also offered) with a cancellable progress bar, and you manage them under **Settings → Voice**. On Apple Silicon it's Metal-accelerated — a short dictation transcribes in a few hundred milliseconds. Voice is macOS-first for now; the mic permission prompt appears the first time you record. ### Hands-free: auto-stop and auto-send You don't have to click twice. **Auto-stop** (energy-based voice-activity detection) ends the recording a moment after you stop speaking, and **auto-send** submits the finished dictation for you — so you can just speak and let it go, no Enter, no second click. Both are on by default and toggleable under **Settings → Voice**; `Esc` mid-recording still cancels without sending. ### Dictate from anywhere The same mic button lives in the Spotlight-style quick-query overlay, so you can dictate a question without switching to the main window (recording keeps the overlay open rather than auto-dismissing). And a system-wide, rebindable **global voice hotkey** (default `⌘⇧V` on macOS, `Alt+Shift+V` on Windows) opens the overlay already listening — dictate from any app without clicking anything first. Rebind it under **Settings → General → Voice input**. ### 99 languages, and translate-to-English Alongside the English-only models, multilingual Whisper models (`base` , `small` , `large-v3-turbo` ) cover 99 languages. **Settings → Voice** adds a language picker (auto-detect or a specific language) and a **Translate to English** toggle — speak in one language and have the transcript land in English. Both apply to the multilingual models; the English-only models always transcribe English. ## How to get it The [releases page](https://github.com/ekorbia/ekorbia-desktop/releases/latest) has the latest bundles for macOS, Windows, and Linux. Existing users upgrade in place — your chats, prompts, and settings carry over, and any old chat groups migrate to Spaces automatically on first launch. Voice input is macOS-first this release; everything else in v0.4 and v0.5 works across all three platforms.